Myra Breckinridge

American novel development

...in a more permissive age, can record cognate agonies. Generally speaking, any novelist writing after the publication in the 1960s of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge can expect little objection, on the part of either publisher or police, to language or subject matter totally unacceptable, under the obscenity laws then operating, in 1922,...

discussed in biography

...President Abraham Lincoln’s complex personality as viewed through the eyes of some of his closest associates during the American Civil War, is particularly notable. Another success was the comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968; film 1970), in which Vidal lampooned both transsexuality and contemporary American culture.